Crayon
by pastelshadows
Summary: Rachel likes drawing. Nico likes snooping. Really, it was only a matter of time. Rico.


"No! Not that one, di Angelo! Where the Hades did you get that one, anyway? That was _under_ my _bed_."

"Which you made me move like three minutes ago! No, let me guess, you _predicted _me putting it back?"

"I'm going to slap you if you don't shut up and put that thing where you found it!"

"That's what she said."

Rachel sighed loudly and sank into a cross-legged position on the floor, looking around her half-rearranged room. Nico flopped down on her newly moved bed, echoing her sigh but louder and more suggestive. He had kindly offered to help her rearrange her attic in the Big House - apparently she had been lacking on visions and needed a more "creative" atmosphere for the Oracle thing to work - and was now regretting it. Greatly. They had been there for at least four hours and Rachel was still digging out scrolls and easels and sketch books and binders and gods know what.

"Rachel, you should throw out some of this crap. I mean, what the Hades is this?" he said in curiosity, tugging a pitch-black sketch book out from one of the cardboard boxes.

"_Nonononono_!" Rachel shrieked, jumping at Nico as he began to flip the book open. It was knocked from his hands as he, Rachel on top of him, tumbled off the bed and hit the floor with a thud.

"Whoa, Rach, you trying to get some?" he teased as she untangled herself from him.

She smacked his chest, trying not to wince. Did he work out? "Enough with the virgin jokes, okay? I thought you would have matured enough by now."

"I'm right in the middle of my teenage angst period, and the me-being-a-goth-and-my-dad-being-the-lord-of-the-dead thing doesn't help too much. I need to get my happy fix _somewhere_."

"Alcohol, Nico. Look it up." Rachel looked her room over again and grimaced. "We're gonna be here a while. Sorry, kiddo."

"I'm fifteen, I'm not a _kiddo_." He made a face. "And it's okay. That's what friends are for, right?"

Rachel bent her head slightly, letting her long hair cover her blush. "Yup," she said, keeping the regret out of her voice. "The best of friends."

"You okay?" Nico kinda had a built-in radar for depression, being the father of all Goths himself, and he could detect Rachel's mood shift to sadness.

"I'm fine."

"Liar."

"I'm just hungry, okay?" Rachel snapped, glaring at him. If she was being honest, she would have replied, _No, Nico, I'm not fine at all because I want nothing more than to be with you and to hold your hand and kiss you, but I can't because you don't feel the same_, but she decided to go with the typical answer.

Nico held his hands up in surrender. "Okay, okay," he said defensively, coughing "rag" under his breath. Rachel smacked the back of his neck as she sauntered out of the room.

"I'm getting us hot dogs," she called as she disappeared out of sight on the stairs. Once Nico couldn't hear her footsteps, he darted across the room and grabbed the sketch book.

Flipping it open, he found that he was looking at a bunch of portraits of someone's face. Then he realized that he was looking at _himself_. Rachel had captured his likeness exactly, in his high cheekbones and full lips and messy hair. It was a quick pencil drawing but she had shaded in his olive skin tone and hair and eyes. In this one his eyebrows were raised and his lips were pursed in a cynical expression. On the opposite page ...

Were those doodled hearts?

He flipped the page quickly, not allowing himself to believe it. It couldn't happen.

He was looking at another drawing of him, but it was a full-body shot. He was leaning against Thalia's tree, running a finger absentmindedly along the side of his dagger. He had a lazy expression on his face.

"She must have drawn this out of memory," he muttered. She didn't have anything with her at that time. He had just shown up and announced that he was taking her out to the lake for a surprise picnic.

It kinda made his heart wrench to think about the completely platonic night out, so he quickly turned the page.

This was an upper-body portrait, up to his torso. He was leaning back on his elbows and he was scowling straight out of the page, but even on paper his eyes glittered with humor and a carefree sense.

Nico remembered this one at once. Rachel had moved on from the oil painting phase to photography, and for some reason Nico was her main subject. Sure, there were a few Percies and Annabeths in there, even a couple random demigods, but he was the main subject. He always thought it was cuz she was interested in his gothness or he would look normal in black-and-white pictures or whatever, but as he flipped to another portrait of him with hearts doodled all around it, he began to suspect ulterior motives.

Suddenly an extremely colorful one jumped out at him, and he had to squint for a second before realizing it was one of those things where it's colored totally unlike real life. Apparently it was supposed to be artistic or modern or whatever, but he didn't know crap about art, so he decided to just admire.

This time his face was completely expressionless. His hair stuck up in an orange disarray, his face was shaded softly with a very pale shade of blue, and his lips were neon green. His eyes weren't colored in; they were literally just white orbs in his face, making him look slightly creepy. Beneath it Rachel had written in her scrawly handwriting, _I may not be your favorite crayon color, but one day you'll need me to complete your picture.  
><em>  
>Nico didn't get it. It was probably something else artistic. The rest of the pages were blank, but when he reached the back cover, he noticed something scribbled into the inside of it.<p>

_Tribute to Nico di Angelo._

Then beneath it, in much smaller writing, _σ 'αγαπώ, Nico_.

Nico's heart leapt. In his dyslexic brain, the letters rearranged themselves to form a simple, but complex, _I love you_.

A million thoughts rushed through his head, like "put the book down" and "oh my gods, she feels the same" and even "where are my hot dogs?"

That last question was answered rather unfortunately.

"What in _Hades_ are you _doing_?" screamed a shrill voice from the doorway, and Nico dropped the book and turned around, a guilty blush creeping over his face. Rachel stood there, her mouth agape, a panicked look in her eyes and two hot dogs in her hands. She put them down carefully on the nearest flat surface (a dried-paint-splattered table) and attacked Nico.

"You _ass_!" she screeched her tiny fists thumping against any part of Nico she could reach. They weren't doing any damage, seeing as he grabbed her wrists and held her arms to her sides.

"Rachel -"

"I told you not to read it! But no! You look at it anyway and, oh gods, all those _drawings_-"

"Rachel?"

"And ugh, all those freaking heart doodles - I must look like an idiot -"

"_Rachel_."

"And please, don't tell me you looked at the back cover! Of course you did. Tribute? I might as well have written shrine! I must be totally -"

"Rachel Elizabeth Dare, _shut up_." Rachel closed her mouth and looked up at Nico through tears.

"What, Nico?"

"_S 'agapo pára polý_," he murmured, looking down at her, and she could see honesty in his eyes. _I love you too_. It was so simple.

"Rachel ... We can't," he quickly pulled away and said, and she could feel every carefully-placed brick in the wall around her heart slip loose.

"W-what? Nico ..."

"The rule," he said in remorse, releasing his grip on Rachel's wrist to run a hand through his messy hair. Rachel's free hand flew up to cup his face.

"Oh, Nico. Poor naïve Nico." He looked down suspiciously, and she was giving him a playful smile. "The rule states that the Oracle must stay a virgin. It never mentioned anything like _this_." And she stood on her tiptoes and kissed his lips fiercely. He sighed, and gripped her hips, pulling her to him, while she tangled her hands in his hair like she always wanted to do.

"Wait, wait," he gasped, and stepped back. Rachel pouted while he picked up the Nico Notebook (as he would go on to call it) and skimmed through the pages to the brightly colored one.

"Where are my eyes?" he asked.

"I didn't know what color to fill them in," Rachel admitted. "They flash so many colors in my brain ... Red for passion, or blue for calm, or a grey for the lifelessness you adopt most of the time ..."

"Mm-hmmm."

"But now I know."

"Mm-hmmm?"

She grabbed a pencil off the floor and shaded his eyes in quickly.

They were black, because Rachel wanted him exactly the way he was.

And it was cliché, but it was the truth.


End file.
